A:EftP - So i'm trying to understand this remake thing.

[Mooraz]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Unfortunately, Fantasoft has kind of imploded, which means it's not likely anything further is going to happen with Realmz.

Another great old school game lost.

[Kinsume]

Originally Posted By: Mooraz

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Unfortunately, Fantasoft has kind of imploded, which means it's not likely anything further is going to happen with Realmz.

Another great old school game lost.

This guy went from lurker status to registered just to post that. Made me laugh lol xD

[Mooraz]

Originally Posted By: Kinsume

Originally Posted By: Mooraz

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Unfortunately, Fantasoft has kind of imploded, which means it's not likely anything further is going to happen with Realmz.

Another great old school game lost.

This guy went from lurker status to registered just to post that. Made me laugh lol xD

I won't lie, I totally did. Also, I want to add to the conversation about the encumbrance backpack issue: It's a MAGIC junk bag. Problem solved.

[Marak]

If in doubt: a Wizard did it.

[Alarian]

I've been playing SW games since Exile and am a huge fan of both Jeff and his company. That said I fall into the category of not being impressed with the changes in the last two games.

 

To me they have been dumbed down quite a bit. Creating a party and leveling them up was a good chunk of the fun for me. I liked being able to see the difference when I leveled up a spell. The new skill tree reminds me of World of Warcraft, and in my book that is not a good thing. Woo woo I got a 2% buff. Who cares. And the you need to take these 3 worthless skills that you will never use and waste 7 levels worth of your skill points to get the 1 skill you want is, well, not good. Sure, back in the old days you could screw up a build, but if it was really that big of a deal to you and you don't want to start over, simply load up the character editor and fix it. Its not like every news station would have a news flash and say "This just in, Steve Wilson just used a character editor in Avernum 2! No one needs to panic, authorities have picked him up and he has been safely incarcerated." You could simply make the changes and continue playing. I know I did it more than once over the years.

 

A lot of the changes I have seen also remind me of 4th edition D&D, and again for me, this is not an improvement. All the special moves and such don't impress me. And what the heck is with locks and lock picking now. Making it so you have to scour the entire game just to try and get enough picks to open doors and chests, that's an exercise in tedium if I've ever seen it. In what game world would anyone ever play a thief if they knew they would have to devote their entire life searching for rare tools so that they could open a dozen or so doors and chests over their entire career. Now that's a class I wouldn't want to play. Put back in varying lock difficulties and give the thieves adequate tools. If there is a door you don't want picked for a while fine, give it a high lock difficulty but come on. I think it's safe to say that in some primitive underground world, commoners are not going to have to resources to create chests that are unopenable unless you basically quest for lock picks.

 

Have there been improvements? Of course, there are many, but the heart of what made the games awesome for me for many years has been removed and replaced with a cheap plastic version. I know his sales have improved and that is awesome, but I fear in his attempt to draw in new players he going to be leaving some of his old, long time fans behind. I know I most likely won't be as quick to jump in to his next game or two unless some of the depth of character generation.

 

I hope I don't come off as sounding too negative. I have been enjoying the last two games, but not nearly as much as pretty much every previous game of his I have played. Will I finish either? I honesty don't know yet. I do know I certainly am not enjoying them as much as others.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Alarian

I know his sales have improved and that is awesome, but I fear in his attempt to draw in new players he going to be leaving some of his old, long time fans behind.

Well, I mean, it's your loss, but you don't have to justify yourself; you don't have any kind of obligation to play games that you're not enjoying more than other things you could do with your time. Personally, as someone else who's been playing SW games since Exile 1, I've found the new design paradigms to be a breath of fresh air.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Jeff had been on a bit of a Mass Effect kick on his blog at the time Avadon was in development, so the similarities are probably more than coincidental.

Dragon Age, I think. But once you play Avadon, it's stops being so strange. You still have full control over the development of your whole party. The only change from Exile/Avernum/Nethergate is not having complete freedom, in that classes are chosen at the beginning and you can only have up to two of any one class.

Originally Posted By: Mooraz

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Unfortunately, Fantasoft has kind of imploded, which means it's not likely anything further is going to happen with Realmz.

Another great old school game lost.

Realmz had heart, and some good ideas. It was also hugely buggy, had no combat balance to speak of, had terrible writing and editing, and usually lacked more than an excuse plot. I played it, I registered it, and I enjoyed it, but a great game it was not.

Alarien, your biggest complaint leaves me baffled. Spiderweb skills have always given you small, incremental bonuses to abilities. The skill tree has its weaknesses, but retraining is no different from the character editor, which is back as of A:EftP. The special moves have been the way games have been working since, oh, the late 90's. D&D followed the trend to become more cRPG-like, not vice versa! And if you just want to hit things with a sword, you can still do that just fine. In fact, Avadon was the aberration there; in A:EftP the battle disciplines aren't exclusively for fighters and aren't your major use of actions in combat.

—Alorael, who will otherwise leave what Lilith said. You don't have to like the new games, or keep playing them. It's just that some of your complaints seem a little odd.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: The worst thing? The cyphers.

Dragon Age, I think.

It was both. I distinctly remember him writing a blog entry complaining about not being able to throw one of the Mass Effect 2 party members out the airlock, but now that you mention it, he blogged about Dragon Age too.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

Quote:

Realmz had heart, and some good ideas. It was also hugely buggy, had no combat balance to speak of, had terrible writing and editing, and usually lacked more than an excuse plot. I played it, I registered it, and I enjoyed it, but a great game it was not.

This. In all respects, this. Oh man, I remember the first version of Realmz I played: there were several scenarios in which you couldn't equip weapons, only unequip them. In most cases, this was just annoying and unbalancing, but it actually made the scenario 'Destroy the Necronomicon' unplayable, because there was a boss fight late in the scenario that required you to use a set of magic scimitars to do damage. They fixed it a few months down the line, but this was pretty typical of the amount of testing that went into Realmz.

[Alorael at Large]

Really, with the way Avadon works, it could just as easily be the product of much older BioWare games. KotOR, say, or even Baldur's Gate with the idea of experience leak added on.

 

—Alorael, who had the most fun with Realmz's minor, interesting ideas with no thought put into them. You could swap party members in and out any time except combat... which meant pack mules became very useful. Not in the usual way; your fighters would almost certainly have enough strength to carry a vast load. Instead, you could send your pack characters to a town, or another scenario, with money to go buy more potions or whatever. Interesting and stupid!

[Ceiling Durkheim]

The idea of using different power levels of spells at will was also an interesting and fun one, as well as fairly realistic (unless you're thinking in terms of a really, really Vancian system of magic, a wizard who can cast a twenty foot radius fireball can probably also cast a ten foot radius fireball). Not always well implemented, but I would still list it as a positive.

[Bloody Hypocrite]

Despite it's flaws, I still love Realmz to death. The writing is really dependent on the author of each scenario, but overall I enjoyed most of the scenarios. As for the technical issues, somehow I lucked out with only one game stopping bug in 10 plus scenarios on the windows port. I still hope that one day we might get to see a Realmz remake.

[Kinsume]

What program is used to code/edit this game by the way?

[Alorael at Large]

Once upon a time, part of the Spiderweb website said that Jeff programmed in C++. I think he even specified that he used Metrowerks CodeWarrior. That would have been a long time ago, though; I don't think CodeWarrior has been prominent on Macs since the the early 2000's, and it was entirely dropped by the Intel switch that wrapped up in 2007. Now I imagine Jeff's still using C++; he may be using the developer tools that come with Mac OS, or he may still buy some 3rd-party IDE.

 

—Alorael, who thinks the fact that the scripting language is C-like also gives evidence that C is still the language of choice in Spiderwebland. Periodically people recommend that Jeff switch to Java for ease of porting. That may be true, but Java has its own issues, and Jeff is too set in his ways to try a new language now.

[Kinsume]

Yeah I guess it would be hard to make the switch after using a set code all these years. Could prove to be less of a hassle in the long run though if he plans on continuing to pump out the games. Quicker porting means quicker remakes and releases, which means more $$$

[Slawbug]

Originally Posted By: Illegal Furniture

The idea of using different power levels of spells at will was also an interesting and fun one, as well as fairly realistic (unless you're thinking in terms of a really, really Vancian system of magic, a wizard who can cast a twenty foot radius fireball can probably also cast a ten foot radius fireball). Not always well implemented, but I would still list it as a positive.

"Realistic" according to what conception of magic?

If you see casting a spell as kind of like ordering a pizza except you use willpower and magical energy instead of a phone and money, then yes, that would be realistic.

If you see casting a spell as performing a specific ritual that invokes specific powers to cause something specific to happen, then no, that would not be realistic.

One of those things corresponds very closely to the way humans who have purported to have magical powers have done things throughout history. And one of those things corresponds very closely to anime.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

If you see casting a spell as kind of like ordering a pizza except you use willpower and magical energy instead of a phone and money, then yes, that would be realistic.

If you see casting a spell as performing a specific ritual that invokes specific powers to cause something specific to happen, then no, that would not be realistic.

One of those things corresponds very closely to the way humans who have purported to have magical powers have done things throughout history. And one of those things corresponds very closely to anime.

The second one is the one that's meant to correspond to anime, right? Because historically, magic was frequently conceptualised as bargaining with intelligent spirits that have control over natural forces, as exemplified by ancient Greek and Roman curse tablets or in texts such as the Key of Solomon. These spirits were beseeched to produce some effect desired by the magician and compensation was offered -- not so unlike ordering a pizza. Under this model, it's entirely reasonable that the beings you're bargaining with could produce greater effects in proportion to how much you're willing to offer them.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

@Slarty: that's why I specified Vancian magic, as in based on the novels of Jack Vance, best known in the RPG world from the spell systems of the first three editions of D&D. The "anime" system has a fairly wide precedent in modern fantasy as well (Robert Jordan, David Eddings, Star Wars if you want to count that), while many foundational works of fantasy (Tolkien, Lovecraft) don't really bother to specify the exact mechanics of magic.

 

And, as Lilith said, magic use as described in most forms of world mythology doesn't really correspond to either of the systems of magic we seem to favor. We're both talking about forms of magic that are in some meaningful sense intrinsic to the caster, whereas most 'magical' rituals throughout history have been largely at the whim of some outside agency. Whether we're talking about the Goetia and the various Solomonic demon texts, the form of witchcraft described in Malleus Maleficarum, Formicarius, and their various successors, the late Greco-Roman concept of theurgy, aristeia as demonstrated in the works of Homer, or the various mystical powers exhibited by Jewish prophets and Christian saints and apostles, those are all the action of some god/God, demon, or spirit working through an individual. There are also many works, like medieval lapidaries or various Taoist alchemical texts, that attribute magical power to objects. The notion of magic as inherent to the human that casts it doesn't come up in many places in religion/mythology, if anything it's kind of aberrant: the most direct analog would be the Pacific Islander concept of mana, and the story of Sundiata from Mali goes more the modern wizard route; if you really wanted to stretch I suppose the Taoist notion of wu wei could possibly qualify as well, but I think that's about it.

 

Magic as ritual invocation of another being operates on fundamentally different sets of rules from both 'magic as formula' and 'magic as ki.'

 

The point is, when you say:

 

Quote:

One of those things corresponds very closely to the way humans who have purported to have magical powers have done things throughout history. And one of those things corresponds very closely to anime.

 

...that's patently false, and phrased pretty disdainfully as well (my favorite combination!). Neither of our concepts of magic correspond well to the idea of it held by pre-modern humans. Both of them correspond pretty well to two opposing ideas of magic established in fiction from around 1950 onward.

[Alorael at Large]

What you're describing is Vancian magic, of course, with sandestins.

 

—Alorael, who would put "bargaining with external beings" magic in a category of its own. "Will and effort" magic where the power and the effect come from the caster is distinctly different.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: The worst thing? The cyphers.

What you're describing is Vancian magic, of course, with sandestins.

—Alorael, who would put "bargaining with external beings" magic in a category of its own. "Will and effort" magic where the power and the effect come from the caster is distinctly different.

Funny story: I was originally going to posit a third category instead of posting what I did but I decided to be a little snarky because come on, it's me. Still, it's more like the first category than the second from a game-mechanical perspective, if you accept spell points as a kind of abstracted measure of bargaining resources.

[Alorael at Large]

If we're going to start listing magic systems, there are many with substantial differences. There are popular and less popular ones, and they range from highly technical to whimsical to read-between-the-lines mystical.

 

—Alorael, who tries a game in which the magic system was actually based on rewriting the laws of reality. Seriously! You got to add or remove code from the game. The problem, of course, was that any slight error in casting was likely to add or remove code in a way you didn't want. A few miscastings might just make the game a little bit buggy or glitchy, but screw up too many times and you'd get game-stopping bugs, and that was that.